


perhaps to die for love is as good a martyrdom as any

by twatsworthy



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 02:02:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twatsworthy/pseuds/twatsworthy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know him; you know him as the craftsman knows his trade, with absolute certainty that cannot and will not be dissuaded. You know him as the callouses under your fingers know to pick up the brush and to recreate, with a few simple strokes, a dynamo of colours and ecstasy and perhaps a puerile excitement, for you know that he brings that out in you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	perhaps to die for love is as good a martyrdom as any

You know him; you know him as the craftsman knows his trade, with absolute certainty that cannot and will not be dissuaded. You know him as the callouses under your fingers know to pick up the brush and to recreate, with a few simple strokes, a dynamo of colours and ecstasy and perhaps a puerile excitement, for you know that he brings that out in you.

You watch him often; lonely afternoons that merge into evenings in a café far too well-stocked with your best and only poison have become your favourite pastime, hours spent detailing and memorizing and documenting him for a visceral pleasure in the middle of the night. Your fingers itch to draw him, and yet your bones have become cracked and feeble and they are but paws, unable to recreate such wondrous marble. Libertine exasperation has aged him in a way that nature alone never could; he wears it well, a look of pasts that cannot be his own, for his beautiful eyes are far too haunted for a man of but twenty-two. His pallor makes you tremble in a way that sickens you; for above all things you detest weakness; and yet weaken you it does, for you cannot trust the mesmerizing way in which the grey becomes a sickly white and blue, perhaps tinged with a feverish red in parts, yet so much lacking in fruitful, peachy tones that it causes you to both fear for his wellbeing and lust after his pulchritude.

He is not comely; he is not alluring, and you wonder at times when you deplore him the most if he is even handsome. Such whirlwinds and tempests cannot be described with the words applied first to humanity; you have known from the second you laid eyes on the impossible marble that he was not perhaps fully human. He was, has always been, a hurricane in which his cronies and followers and perhaps those to whom he refers to so sparingly as ‘friends’ (he has never done it to you, a reminder which causes you to take another surly swig of whiskey) have been desperately caught up, never trying to seek salvation in a lifeline perhaps because they have not yet realized the immediacy of the danger that they are in from trying to love a wild thing.

You know; have always known; it is a mark of your self-loathing that you nonetheless allowed yourself to adore him with absolution, with persistence, with rabid veneration that causes you at times to see the wild thing through a vapour. You fear most the days in which he pushes through this vapour, for this is when he is feral; he is, first and foremost, wonderful, and yet there are times in which he simply cannot be. He remains stoic at the gazes of a thousand female adorers, and yet you know that he would fall, smitten, at the feet of liberty embodied, to kiss her shoes.

You would die for him; you would die with him; oh, but if you could trade your life and give him in return the better dawn he longs for! It would suit his tongue far better than your name ever could.

He must not know. You must be a haze; you must be drowning, always, in wine and opium and cynicism and a narcissistic glare that will scarcely conceal the adoration that he must never, never see. He must not know, and you cannot let him fall.

You cannot let him fall alone.


End file.
